Inappropriation Page 14

  “Hey Lex, do you think the boys should show us how they do it?”

  The laughter is unanimous and nullifying. For a moment. And then Lex leans back queenly into the couch cushions. “That could be interesting . . .”

  The boys go quiet. Rupert pretends to be focused on the abandoned game, his avatar bowling into a tree then butting repeatedly against its trunk. The air is suddenly hot and surging. A molecular consensus of low vibrations. All of them pulled along, equally.

  But more precisely, it starts with Ziggy.

  “Let’s move up into the living room.”

  Away from her brother. The boys rise and drag their blobby, socked feet to the stairs. Lex follows languidly behind. She seems soft and loose in her body, happy to let Ziggy lead them astray. In the living room, they make a circle. The girls sit on their haunches; Jacob’s friends lounge with bent legs, clearly trying to disguise their fly-tenting boners.

  It seems to happen organically. With both dreamy slowness and mechanical inevitability. Ziggy aims the GoPro at Lex and repeats the question. Her friend titters, eyes downcast and illegible, which the boys interpret as an unambiguous command. With only a brief preamble of giggling, the seventh graders begin worming their hands in under their waistbands. It takes a moment for Ziggy to comprehend that the boys are actually tugging. It is a dull shock that fuzzies the air. From somewhere far back inside herself, Ziggy observes the scene, reduced and quiet, as if projected on a screen. Lex’s face is set in a neutral mask, minutely grimacing, but the boys have fierce purpose. There is a reddish aim in their eyes as they strain toward Lex, then Ziggy, then back again to Lex. Their mouths are twitching; their lids flutter. They seem to hold the girls there, caught in the fever of their gaze. Ziggy knows the feeling in the room has turned too animal, but she feels safe with the camera on her head.

  There is a soft wheeze from Lucien and then all three boys are shuddering into their laps. The bleachy uppercut of semen knocks Ziggy off-balance, and the whole room seems to dunk underwater. But, folding over their crotches, the boys look as frail as seahorses. Lex makes a little yelp but Ziggy ignores it, feeling suddenly sorry for exposing these fragile internet-sexuals to the harsh physical realm. Then she glances at her friend; Lex is violently rubbing her left eye. She stops and looks up at Ziggy, the eye red and puffy and seeping.

  “They got me,” she growls. “They got me in my fucking eye!”

  The next hour is a furious blur of Lex panicked and raging in Ziggy’s bedroom. Her eye swells and pinkens horribly. Google thinks she’ll need antibiotics. Every ten minutes, the little boys knock on Ziggy’s door, eager and terrified to know how Lex is doing. The girls yell them away. Mostly Lex wants to blame Ziggy. Apparently, Lex didn’t want to watch a circle jerk. The boys are thirteen. They could both go to fucking jail. Ziggy apologizes over and over. She doesn’t dare try the line: I thought it would be funny.

  The inflammation slowly subsides, but Lex remains irate. What Ziggy made them endure is a type of sexual harassment. She’s a bully. Ziggy pleads that she is only an aspiring filmmaker.

  “Tessa showed me the meme you made.” Lex’s mouth crimps with disgust. “It was creepy.”

  This insult is familiar from the Red Pill. A word women use to make men want to shrivel up and die. Ziggy’s creative instincts are off, and worse: Ziggy herself is a biological aberration. After another hour of verbal abuse and many cold compresses, Lex finally relents, falling into an agitated sleep.

  But the circle jerk keeps Ziggy up most of the night. She worries about Lex, then Jake, and then her thoughts are moving with a kind of violent, game-play dissociation. She sees her shirtless father and his bare-chested friends wrestling on the couch while eating drippy mangoes; reels of sidebar comments from porn-cams; a slut-shaming session on Reddit where a celebrity Instagram account was decimated by a group of anonymously impotent men. There are circle jerks happening all around her, and Ziggy feels implicated in each of them. With her flat chest and ambiguous sexual identity, Ziggy must have seemed to Lex like the little boys’ ringleader.

  Chapter 7

  After Lex’s eye-rape, Ziggy understands that she must now identify as a straight, cisgender female at the pretty popular end of the spectrum. In tight, rib cage–revealing dresses and heavy makeup, Ziggy finds she can dissociate from her body and transport her sense of self to that distant future time when she is famous and nobody can make her share her feelings. In borrowed crop tops, belly exposed to universal ridicule, Ziggy escapes to her mental fantasy of an impenetrable identity, fortressed by celebrity aura and framed by illustrious facades. In this soothing reverie, Ziggy’s body is nothing but a dim glow inside the gilded jaws of the Dolby Theatre or floating in the dark, elegant sea of tuxedos on the Cannes red carpet. Sometimes she can feel the musty esteem of a tweed blazer and the airy blithe of an undercut, but her own image is mostly void.

  Lex appears to have forgiven Ziggy for the circle jerk but has moved into a very demanding phase of their friendship. She is suddenly desperate to go to nightclubs and for the two of them to stand around at Bondi Junction, licking ice blocks in jacket weather while pretending not to be molecularly aware of the adjacent Randalls seniors. Ziggy finds that a thin outer layer of irony can get her through these afternoons with minimal discomfort. While Lex preens her confectionary with the sensual indifference of a jungle cat, Ziggy views their surrounds with a critical eye, silently commentating. She likes to watch the Randalls boys drink protein shakes at the juice counter, their voices dropping and egos inflating with every sip. After thirty minutes Ziggy’s friend is usually finished waiting for a frightened teenage boy to morph into an adult movie star and approach her with compliments. Unfortunately, Lex’s nightclub aspiration is a lot more focused.

  There is a club the Kandara seniors patronize on Sunday nights, seemingly for the Monday morning glamor of a faded wrist stamp. Embassy is all underage girls and bald Eurotrash valet parking their Maseratis. Inside, a real estate mogul might buy you a Fresh Pussy then show you photos of his teenage daughter from a rival school. You can hear sex and vomiting in the bathrooms and see cocaine frosting along the edges of Amex cards. The bouncers are known to sniff out the girls Uber’d in from the southwest of Sydney. Fake handbags induce hyena laughter and a Rolexed wrist-flick that means, Go back to the Western Suburbs.

  Embassy is in the harborside suburb of Double Bay, where the houses sit on wide, bright smiles of marble staircase and all the SUVs haul speedboats. Jeff says this is because Double Bay is below sea level, and thirty years ago there was a flood. Yachts came jaunting up driveways and stingrays coasted over deck chairs. Nothing so nightmarish had ever befallen the high-functioning conservative Coalition voters of Double Bay, and so they had landscaped their gardens and added second and third stories to their homes. Ruth says Jeff’s fable is social satire, and: “Don’t blame Mother Nature for the nouveau riche.”

  On Double Bay’s main shopping street, wedged between the sparsely stocked and darkly carpeted designer boutiques, sits the sinister black cube of Embassy nightclub. The tinted-glass monolith has made a violent impression on Ziggy’s imagination. Figures shift slyly in the doorway, and Ziggy pictures a cabaret of sexual perversion behind its smoky glass. She knows that management is lax on IDs and gives out memberships to attractive young girls in the form of a heavy steel key. The owner is a young millionaire and alumnus of Randalls, notorious for his orgy parties and his coke dick. He has many friends in the music industry.

  Which is why, this year, the club is hosting the ARIA’s after party. Normally, the Australian music awards are a joke—Lex says the local industry is a bunch of Australia’s Got Talent contestants supporting real stars until they get big enough to host a travel show. But this ARIA’s is different. This year, her American rapper is the international guest of honor.

  Lex’s plan to infiltrate the ARIA’s after party unfolds over an anxious, unusually intimate week between the two friends. Ziggy listens and asks no chal
lenging questions as Lex enlists her in the scheme. She maintains a generous faith in Lex’s ability to laminate fake press passes and transform their birth years from 2001 to 1998. When Lex requests they get dressed that night in her parents’ spacious en suite, Ziggy is flushed with new hope. It seems possible that their friendship might have made a full recovery from the traumatic circle jerk.

  In the bathroom that night, Lex lays out the heteronormative ensembles Ziggy is allowed to wear to Embassy. The miniskirt she settles on makes Ziggy feel pornographically exposed. Her mother’s sordid painting scowls overhead, making Ziggy feel both desirous and terrified of pubic hair. Thankfully, Lex hasn’t noticed it or else doesn’t have an eye for abstraction. She is busy emptying an entire duffel bag full of makeup: things she has purchased or stolen from multiple department stores. Her excuse for shoplifting is a Marxist-feminist phase that Tessa dragged them through briefly last year—Tessa harping on about female beautification as labor and how they had already earned the cosmetics through some invisible economic exchange process. When Ziggy asks why their Marxist phase ended, Lex says, “Because Tessa got a credit card.”

  When they are ready, the girls study themselves in the mirror. Behind their reflections, Ziggy spies the Barbies spilling from their bag in the open closet. Then Lex sees them. She spins around and grabs one, rips out its arm, and starts tap-dancing the doll across the toilet seat.

  “We are all women of color!” chirps the Tessa doll. “I have a great aunt who was born in Egypt!”

  Ziggy giggles nervously.

  “Even my new boyfriend is a woman of color!” Lex continues. “Because he’s gay! Because he has braces!”

  Ziggy’s skin goes cold. Lex’s rant feels pointed, sucking all remaining affinity into its icy orbit. Ziggy doesn’t want to go to Embassy. The rapper has been ignoring Lex’s Snapchats for weeks, and there is no way their evening is going to end in triumph. The rapper will not be returning to Sydney to escort Lex to her formal, Ziggy will not be meeting the middle-aged property developer of her dreams, and neither one of them is going to enjoy standing around awkwardly in a room full of seniors who know they are tenth graders. Ziggy snatches back the Barbie, refits her arm, and returns her to the closet. Hovering there, wanting desperately to stay hidden in the cupboard’s cozy dark, Ziggy remembers a story. It won’t dissuade Lex from her impending romantic humiliation, but Ziggy decides to tell her friend anyway about the four year-seven girls who sexually harassed the famous American swimmer.

  After the London Olympics, the four unathletic victims of puppy fat had fallen in love with the gargantuan, bucktoothed goofball who slashed all the world records and had his own leisurewear label. Every lunchtime, they “borrowed” the mobile phone of Natalya (their grade’s richest Russian émigré) to call the Mission Bay Aquatic Center, where they were put straight through to their Olympian paramour. The American thought it was hilarious. These four teenage girls (they were twelve at the time but bumped their ages to fifteen) calling him to talk about his day, his girlfriend, her boobs, whether he liked to suck them? The American wanted to know if kangaroos jumped through their streets and koalas hung off the telephone poles? The girls humored him—saying they rode their native fauna to school. The American guffawed and then admitted to being a breast man. And an ass man. Or really mostly a breast man. Six months later, the Olympian told them he was coming to Sydney for a swim meet, and the girls made their arrangements. Rachel Rubenstein’s father got them into the Sydney International Aquatic Centre as volunteer towel girls. The four of them had to walk around with plastic baskets, collecting used towels and laying out clean ones. That day, when the American strode out to his diving block, Rachel R. was there to greet him. She placed a fresh towel on his chair and batted her thick Jewessy lashes and pouted her hot-pink twelve-year-old lips. Then she told him who she was. The American came third-last. Afterward he avoided the girls, slinking quickly into the greenroom, where towel bearers were not allowed to go.

  Unsurprisingly, Lex does not seem moved by Ziggy’s story. “I didn’t know the Jews also controlled swimming.”

  Ziggy is speechless. She sits on the tub’s rim with her chin in her hands, despair thinning to apathy. “Jews can’t even swim,” she lies.

  Lex nods distractedly, molesting her side part in the mirror. “Can you blow-dry my hair?”

  Ziggy cannot. But she knows who would relish this almost as much as childbirth. Ruth loves blow-drying Ziggy’s curls. It has always been a kind of unspoken bonding activity enjoyed in the enforced silence of the dryer’s blast. Ziggy summons her mother from the top of the stairs. The woman is there in less than ten seconds.

  While Ruth homogenizes Lex’s hair, the two women yell loudly about makeup. Ziggy’s mother has helpful hints about eye shadow. How to make the lids look fuller, how to achieve the “smoky effect.” Of course Lex would like the smoky effect. Ruth completes the blow-dry and then pulls up the Instagram of Italy’s first lady.

  “She’s got great technique,” admires Ruth.

  Lex sighs dreamily and Ziggy’s mother gets to work, the two women slipping into a silent, trancelike state. In the first lady’s eyes, Ziggy sees a self-conscious blankness. The same not-being-thereness that she sees in all her peers’ faces. The trade-off for male attention seems to be a woman’s entire inner life. Ziggy is disturbed to find the smoky effect sexy; it makes Lex’s eyes look dewy and bruised, abused but somehow alluring. When Ruth finishes, she steps back and catcalls Lex with a soft parachuting whistle.

  “Thanks, Mrs. Klein.”

  Once the preparations are over and the two girls are standing in the doorway—painted, straightened, accessorized, and armed with convincing fake IDs, Ruth tells them they look beautiful. Lex’s smoky eyes go opiate. Ziggy wants to weep. Hitler Youth seem pleased with the total mess they have made of Ziggy’s gender identity. Tonight she feels like a drag queen who has misplaced her sense of humor.

  THE CLUB’S LINE IS a fat snake of dark, scintillating glamor and Ziggy gets stuck on the pavement just staring at it.

  “Should we buy some glitter glue from the chemist?”

  Lex wrangles her cleavage, tugging her bra down like the hand of a grabby child. “Trust me,” she says. “The men will just think we’re interns. Which is a good thing.”

  They slink into line. Pale important faces glow above a black sea of warbling sequins. And up ahead, celebrities are cutting in. Ziggy can tell by their casual clothes and giant sunglasses. She keeps her head down as she shuffles along beside Lex; avoiding eye contact even as they reach the bouncers, Lex flashes their lanyards, and the men say enjoy your night and wave them in. And they are in. Ziggy floats up the stairs in a daze. Like rats circling toward the club’s warm, inner chamber, Lex and Ziggy breach door after door stationed with gigantic muscle men squeezed into shiny suits, smiling narcotically at Lex’s ass. The final door opens onto an enormous glass room. The city lights glint off naked forearms and pale bouffants, and the whole room is slicked with silver. Out the windows, Ziggy sees the stately white wedding cakes of Double Bay’s residential zone. These palatial homes—whose orange windows glow with the sanctity of birthday candles—seem virtual from this vantage. Ziggy is surprised to feel a sense of event, of being on the precipice of her own adult life. It is like her mother said Shuni said: to bear conscious witness, you need a very expansive view.

  The bar is in the center of the room: a white marble block rising from the black carpet with the cool luminescence of an iceberg. Behind it gleams a mini metropolis of bottles backlit by warm amber—a city paused in eternal happy hour. A dark hedge of suits encircles the bar. Ziggy sees only a sprinkling of girls—their e-cigarettes blinking furtive green signals across the marble.

  Lex and Ziggy line up for drinks. In seconds, a man with a tremendous silver mane comes shining out of the dark.

  “How’s your night going, girls?”

  Ziggy has been briefed. Anyone in here could know the rapper, or at least have acce
ss to the VIP room. She smiles and tells the man she is well, and thank you for asking. Lex is more strategic. She wants a drink. The man worms back into the dense, Armani underbrush and returns a moment later with two cloudy shot glasses.

  “Fresh Pussy.” He grins and passes the girls their beverages.

  Now Ziggy notices the man’s shirt is unbuttoned halfway down his chest. His face is square and handsome in the biscuity way of middle-aged celebrity men. Lex is looking at him strangely.

  “You’re that judge,” she says.

  The man flashes the fluorescent tube of his orthodontia. “Australia’s Got Talent,” he confirms.

  “No, it doesn’t,” says Lex.

  The judge loves this. Which surprises the girls. They are used to offending boys and alienating themselves within the opening seconds of interaction. But the judge seems intrigued. He is doing something focused with his eyes: narrowing them, squeezing Lex into a more appealing package.

  “Sexy. Bitchy. Badass. I love it.”

  Lex smiles at the talent scout and Ziggy is reminded of the Magnetic Poles. How women are meant to be receptive and relational; how men must forge through the space-time continuum with aggressive, linear force. Lex leans plantlike toward the judge as if trying to increase the surface area of her skin, and Ziggy has the impulse to call her friend a prostitute. Instead, she sips compulsively on her Fresh Pussy, staring into the froth as Lex and John discuss the music industry. The talent scout is amused by Lex’s critique of his reality franchise. He wants to see her YouTube channel. He wants to take her out on his yacht. Then the scout glances between the friends with a rakish smile and places his feet in a wide, martial arts stance of readiness.